Did you read Mark Krikorian’s essay today, “100 years ago, the US took a break from immigration—and America thrived” punished in The New York Post? You should. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Only by taking an extended breather was America able to successfully assimilate the 25 million-plus newcomers who’d arrived after 1880,” he writes. He continues: “Immigrant communities were thus not continually refreshed with newcomers; that, combined with vigorous and self-confident Americanization efforts in schools and elsewhere, forged the strong common national identity that helped America prevail over Nazism and Communism.”
I started writing on this subject after spending a summer in Sweden in 2018. Actually, a bit before that. I had been to Sweden before on more than one occasion, and the difference between my last visit in 2007 and my 2018 trip was day and night. Even before I visited Sweden in 2018, during preliminary research in preparation for my visit, which was going to have a research purpose this time, I was moved to pen a February 2017 essay titled Sweden’s Government in Denial. From Sweden, I wrote Observations from Sweden. In September of 2018 after returning I wrote The Need for Limits and The Immigration Situation. In December of that year I wrote Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class. I have penned several essays in the years since, the latest during the past two months: The Mass Immigration Swindle in April and, this month, How to Rebuild America’s Working Class).
In these essays and the several in between, I show how the greatest period in American history occurred between closing the borders in 1924 and reopening them in 1965. The period was marked by rising wages and standards of living, safe and orderly communities, racial integration, women’s rights, and a high level of patriotism. I have documented that the desire for open borders was a transnationalist plot to disorder America dating from the early 20th century and showed how the destructive policy of multiculturalism was introduced as “cultural pluralism.” You know it in the way the “melting pot” metaphor became the “salad bowl.” Sounds better that way. You know it by the way the imperative of assimilation/integration was reframed as nativism/xenophobia. (See An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion; The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate; The Progressive Politics of Mass Immigration.)
All this was organized by corporate power to destroy the working class and the cultural integrity necessary for democratic republic governance. One of the things that came along with rising wages and better standards of living was a fall in the rate of profit. A national economic strategy depended on cooperation of the labor, and union density and collective bargaining tied wages and benefits to productivity, thus allowing the working class to take a greater share of the surplus value produced by their labor. To restore higher profit rates (at least to attempt to), the corporate states launched a war on labor and the left, crushing the organizations of private sector labor (which expanding public sector unions thus securing loyalty to the administrative state and its extensions).
In the first decade of the new millennium, I taught a course called Power and Change in America. One of the texts we read was Patricia Cayo Sexton’s War on the Labor and the Left. Sexton covers a lot of history. In the post-World War II period, she explores the nuanced tactics employed against labor, spanning from the inception of welfare capitalism to contemporary challenges such as deindustrialization, corporate restructuring, the influence of anti-labor consultants, deregulation, privatization, and labor-management cooperation. Sexton’s main point is that the weakness of labor stems from the unparalleled wealth and influence of corporations, highlighted by their control over the mass media apparatus.
In her work, Sexton didn’t merely downplay the role immigration played in undermining organized labor, her commitments political commitments were such (her first book was Spanish Harlem: The Anatomy of Poverty, published in 1965, and focused on Puerto Rican immigrants) that she sought to show that previous accounts of American exceptionalism that emphasizes divisions in the labor force based on race and immigration were incorrect. Sexton was wrong about the impact of immigration on the fortunes of labor. She is hardly along on the left in making this error. The fact is that the single best thing we could accomplished for the American family in the present moment is closing the borders and deporting the millions the Democrats invited into this country—or at least, as Krikorian suggests, affording the foreigner time to assimilate. Of course, that depends on whether the identitarians and multiculturalists would allow that to happen. I doubt they would. The bottom line is that we cannot have millions of illegal immigrants undermining our communities, diminishing our wages, and compromising our elections.
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As an aside (a personal note, really), in 1969, Sexton authored The Feminized Male: Classrooms, White Collars and the Decline of Manliness. The book is hard to come by, so my summary here is based on several reviews of the book in the social science literature. Sexton argues that the feminized male’s challenges stem from the dynamics with women. With limited authority in the workplace, women often exert control over husbands, sons, and children. Her criticisms extend to white-collar society, which is seen as fostering excessive passivity. Regarding masculinity, she defines it as adhering to male values and behavior norms. These include autonomy, courage, mastery, technological proficiency, and toughness in body and mind. At the same time, emphasis is placed on avoiding stereotypes in gender roles. Instead, society should value individual talents over conformity to traditional gender expectations. Sounds like an interesting read.
freedom and reason 